First, she was trained as a ballet dancer, in part at Balanchine’s School of American Ballet, and she performed professionally-for example, with the Pacific Northwest Ballet, a company long directed by New York City Ballet veterans. Jennifer Homans was well qualified for this assignment.
But in the four decades after his death in 1983, the big biography, the one that would take on the whole subject-the life, the death, the art, the mother-never appeared. A few people-Robert Gottlieb, Terry Teachout, Richard Buckle with John Taras-wrote short biographies. And by doing that, he made all ballet more important he raised the bar worldwide.Īttention has been paid. Balanchine, it can be said, created American ballet, made this way of dancing a mainstream American art, something that Life magazine would put on its cover. What he left us, however, was not just institutions, but an Institution. He founded institutions: theaters, companies, schools-notably his own School of American Ballet, which opened in New York in 1934, and then New York City Ballet, the jewel in his crown, in 1948. His career spanned most of the twentieth century, during which time he created an estimated 425 ballets. Balanchine deserves such coverage, though. With the endnotes, nearly 1,500 of them, the book is close to eight hundred pages long. B.: George Balanchine’s 20th Century, you might want to tell the delivery man to bring a hand truck.
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